


something inside has changed (and maybe i don't wanna stay this way)

by Hissingwillows



Category: The Bold Type
Genre: F/F, Light Angst, Sexuality Crisis, kat is so soft and i want to hug her!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-16
Updated: 2017-07-16
Packaged: 2018-12-02 19:55:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11516313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hissingwillows/pseuds/Hissingwillows
Summary: Kat is straight. So why can't she stop thinking about Adena, who she obviously wants to just be friends with?Mostly an internal processing of her own feelings.





	something inside has changed (and maybe i don't wanna stay this way)

**Author's Note:**

> There's no content on here for The Bold Type yet sooooooo... obviously I had to do SOMETHING about that.
> 
> This is pretty rambly, but it's written to be that way. This is more of an internal monologue of Kat trying to deal with (and deny) her feelings rather than a story with a plot.
> 
> I'll def be writing some kadena relationship stories when they've got more development, but I just wanted to crank this out!

Kat was straight.

Sure, there are a lot of things that Kat doesn’t know. There are plenty of things she wasn't sure about. She is young, just out of college—she knows she doesn't know everything. But Kat knows, for a fact, that she is straight.

Unfortunately, she has a harder time convincing herself of that when she meets Adena.

The first time they meet, Kat’s heart is racing. She easily writes that off as just being nervous. After all, she’d made a scene at the board meeting about dropping the article, and it would be an embarrassment to return empty-handed. She was young to be a director of social media, and she had gone right from being an assistant to having a real position at work - Kat had to prove she earned the job for a reason. She wanted to get the article because she knew it was amazing, and she _needed_  to get the article to prove herself.

Adena isn’t trying to make it easy, either. She is clearly disinterested and downright irritated with her manager for even allowing Kat to come to her studio, and quickly makes it clear she wants nothing to do with Kat or Scarlet Magazine. As quickly as Kat comes in, she is on her way back out with nothing to show for her trip to visit Adena in person.

But her heart is still beating hard and fast when she is halfway home on the subway.

Kat could have let it go and dropped the article. The rest of the team had been prepared to, anyway - why can’t she?

Instead, she emails her manager the picture - _Misunderstood_. It’s partially done to be spiteful, truth be told, but a bigger part of her hopes that it resonates with Adena. That she won’t just see her as an employee of Scarlet, but as a person.

Kat isn’t sure why that matters to her so much.

Either way, she doesn’t expect for Adena to hunt her down at work, much more willing to listen. And she hardly expects to find herself, later that night, sitting in Adena’s apartment dismantling vibrators with her. They talk and laugh and drink and by the time Kat leaves, Adena tells her to run the article. Kat leaves, feeling giddy, and again, she tells herself she is just excited about getting the article. (And maybe about starting a new friendship. Just a friendship. But mostly the article.)

She certainly doesn’t _feel_ something for Adena. No, that would be absurd. It just wouldn’t make any sense. It was only that Adena was an amazing, incredible, intelligent, (and beautiful) woman that Kat wanted to connect with. On a totally, strictly platonic way. _Right?_

It wasn’t like Kat ever had crushes on girls in the past. At least, not ones she noticed. She’d always dated guys. Ever since middle school, it was always about boys with her and her friends. Kat had never even kissed a girl, even though there had certainly been times when it could have happened. There were always those teenage parties with kissing games and truth or dare. She could have, by chance, spun a bottle and kissed a girl, but it was always the boys her bottles pointed to, and it was always the boys that her friends dared her to kiss in a closet. Sometimes Kat dated those boys, but the relationships never worked out. What was supposed to come out of a couple minutes in a coat closet with a sweaty, groping boy, anyway?

She liked the guys she went out with. Most boys remained as nothing more than the sloppy kissers in the closet, but some of them really _were_ nice to her. They took her on nice dates, bought her nice gifts, and were nice to her parents. But… that’s all they really were. _Nice._ Looking back, there was nothing notable about anyone Kat dated or slept with. Her relationships had been steady enough, and generally didn’t end badly, but none lasted all that long.

Kat liked men. Kat dated men. She was absolutely, one-hundred-and-ten-percent hetero. _Right?_

It wasn’t that she was disgusted with herself by the idea of liking women. Of liking _Adena_. She just wasn’t a lesbian. She couldn’t be. Not reasonably, not logically. She had dated plenty of men, hadn’t she? That clearly made her straight.

But the more time she spent with Adena, the harder she found it to convince herself. Kat was more comfortable with Adena every time she saw her, but that feeling from their first encounter was the same. If anything, she only became less composed and rehearsed. It became less about getting another article for Scarlett and more about being with Adena. Her heart still raced, and every touch or smile left her feeling warm and jittery.

Warm in a way she hadn’t felt with men before.

When Adena’s manager calls to tell her that Adena was stopped and detained at the airport, Kat feels like the air is sucked from her lungs. Like she’s been punched in the gut. She doesn’t know what to do or where to go, and nothing Jane nor Sutton can say can soothe her. For once, she feels totally, utterly powerless, and it isn’t long before she finally goes back to Scarlet to find actual help. Jacqueline makes a call, but it isn’t enough, not for Kat. Nothing feels urgent enough. She runs off into the subway and rides it aimlessly, without a destination, trying to figure out what she needs to do to fix this. What she _can_ do to fix this.

There is only one thing Kat has the power to do - blast it on social media. But the pushback is immediate, and Kat’s fear becomes anger as she is shot down from bringing attention to Adena’s situation. Maybe it made sense, and maybe it didn’t, but sense doesn’t matter to Kat. She _needs_ to do something, and that feeling of complete powerlessness returns.

Screaming into the subway doesn’t stop her panic. Jane was right, she needed to scream, to let out her anger and fear, but it doesn’t free Adena, so what does it matter?

Regardless of Kat’s own inner turmoil, Adena is eventually freed, and Kat feels as though a massive weight is taken off her shoulders when she hears her voice again. She was coming back.

Kat isn’t sure what overcomes her when she goes to her office the next day, strips off her shirt and bra, and sends Adena a picture. It wasn’t a nude, not really (right?), it was just an inside joke. She almost forgets about it as soon as she is clothed and back to work.

Adena never responds.

Nor does she respond to any of Kat’s many other texts. Kat tries to ask if she’s alright, if she needs help with anything, if she’s safe now, before she starts wondering if Adena is deliberately ignoring her. Kat’s experienced ghosting before, and this sure feels like it. Was the call to tell her she was coming home just out of politeness? Did Adena not feel the same way? (About being friends, obviously?)

But just as Kat is ready to write Adena off forever, and completely erase the slightest possibility of having any feelings for her out of her mind, there she is, in Scarlet, looking for her. There is Adena, alive and safe and beautiful and smiling, and all of Kat’s irritation is gone. All she can do is smile.

Adena asks her to come to her art show, and the feeling Kat gets is like she’s been asked on a date. Which is stupid. It isn’t a date, and she doesn’t like Adena, she’s just an artist sort-of-friend inviting her to a show. But it doesn’t stop the smile and laugh and warm, warm feeling in Kat’s chest that lasts for hours after Adena has left.

Kat can’t stop thinking about her, and she can’t stop thinking about what the thinking itself means. For her, for them. Does a totally-absolutely-completely-undoubtedly-straight girl think about another woman like this? This much, in this way? Maybe. (Well. Probably not. But Kat isn’t ready to admit that.)

The week goes on. Kat keeps thinking about Adena. Thinking about laughing and drinking with Adena, about hugging Adena. (About kissing Adena. About doing so much more than that.)

It’s not like her friends aren’t supportive of entertaining the notion. Quite the opposite - they’re both (while still distracted with their own problems and lives) excited about figuring this out with Kat. Maybe more excited than Kat herself is. Kat, while she had no close gay friends that she knew of other than Adena, knew of how some girls were; they were immediately disgusted by the notion of a friend being attracted to women. But Jane is still all-too-willing to let Kat stick her hand up her vagina to retrieve her wayward yoni egg.

So her friends weren’t shaming her. Kat hadn’t brought it up to her parents, she didn’t plan to, not yet, and while they would try to psychoanalyze her for certain, she knew their opinions rarely got to her. She was sure if, for whatever strange reason, she mentioned it to Jacqueline, her boss would wave her off and encourage her to ‘take the risk’ and ‘live her life’. There was no one trying to hold her back from coming right out and admitting to herself just how she felt. _So why was it so hard?_ (It was probably because she really was straight. _Right?_ )

Kat goes to the show, and she finally is starting to think that she can convince herself fully that she doesn’t have feelings for Adena. She’ll see her and know for sure of it. Kat has it worked out in her head - they’ll hug, smile, laugh, and then go on to keep being friends, because Kat would know that she wasn’t feeling anything.

But when Adena walks into the room, Kat can’t take her eyes off of her. She feels breathless in such a different way than when she thought she would never see her again. That familiar feeling of being giddy and warm and panicked all at the same time returns, and so Kat, obviously, sticks to the walls with her friends and continues to make excuses to herself  as to why it isn’t the right time to talk to her.

And then, when Kat finally musters up the courage to go talk to Adena, _she_ comes.

The woman that, in an instant, is at Adena’s side. Touching her shoulders, her hips, her face. Kissing her. And Adena is smiling at _her_. Kissing her.

Kat doesn’t understand how something so soft like the kiss they share can hurt her so much. She doesn’t know why the warm feeling is gone and why she just feels sick, just feels like crying, just feels like running back down into the subway with Jane and Sutton and screaming, screaming, screaming.

Something like another woman kissing Adena shouldn’t hurt her like this. Adena was just her friend. (But Kat wanted her to be more.) Kat was straight. (There was no feasible way that she was.) Kat didn’t have feelings for her. (She totally-absolutely-completely-undoubtedly did.)

If Kat was a straight girl, why did this hurt?

Maybe because, despite all odds, despite all her reasoning and denying and excusing, she wasn’t.


End file.
